35. Where it is found to be absolutely necessary to give an infant artificial food WHILE SUCKLING, how often ought he to be fed?
Not oftener than twice during the twenty-four hours, and then only in small quantities at a time, as the stomach requires rest, and at the same time can manage to digest a little food better than it can a great deal.
Let me again urge upon you the importance, if it be at all practicable, of keeping the child entirely to the breast for the first three or four months of his existence. Remember there is no real substitute for a mother’s milk; there is no food so well adapted to his stomach; there is no diet equal to it in developing muscle, in making bone, or in producing that beautiful plump rounded contour of the limbs; there is nothing like a mother’s milk alone in making a child contented and happy, in laying the foundation of a healthy constitution, in preparing the body for a long life, in giving him tone to resist disease, or in causing him to cut his teeth easily and well; in short, the mother’s milk is the greatest temporal blessing an infant can possess.
As a general rule, therefore, when the child and the mother are tolerably strong, he is better without artificial food until he has attained the age of three or four months; then it will usually be necessary to feed him twice a day, so as gradually to prepare him to be weaned (if possible) at the end of nine months. The food mentioned in the foregoing conversation will be the best for him, commencing without the cow’s milk, but gradually adding it, as less mother’s milk and more artificial food be given.
36. When the mother is not able to suckle her infant herself, what ought to be done?
It must first be ascertained, beyond all doubt, that a mother is not able to suckle her own child. Many delicate ladies do suckle their infants with advantage, not only to their offspring, but to themselves. “I will maintain,” says Steele, “that the mother grows stronger by it, and will have her health better than she would have otherwise. She will find it the greatest cure and preservative for the vapors [nervousness] and future miscarriages, much beyond any other remedy whatsoever. Her children will be like giants, whereas otherwise they are but living shadows, and like unripe fruit; and certainly if a woman is strong enough to bring forth a child, she is beyond all doubt strong enough to nurse it afterward.”
Many mothers are never so well as when they are nursing; besides, suckling prevents a lady from becoming pregnant so frequently as she otherwise would. This, if she be delicate, is an important consideration, and more especially if she be subject to miscarry. The effects of a miscarriage are far more weakening than those of suckling.
A hireling, let her be ever so well inclined, can never have the affection and unceasing assiduity of a mother, and, therefore, cannot perform the duties of suckling with equal advantage to the baby.
The number of children who die under five years of age is enormous—many of them from the want of the mother’s milk. There is a regular “parental baby slaughter”—“a massacre of the innocents”—constantly going on in England, in consequence of infants being thus deprived of their proper nutriment and just dues! The mortality from this cause is frightful, chiefly, occurring among rich people who are either too grand, or, from luxury, too delicate, to perform such duties: poor married women, as a rule, nurse their own children, and, in consequence, reap their reward.
If it be ascertained, past all doubt, that a mother cannot suckle her child, then, if the circumstances of the parents will allow—and they ought to strain a point to accomplish it—a healthy wet-nurse should be procured, as, of course, the food which nature has supplied is far, very far superior to any invented by art.